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The On-Going Colonial Present
Week 10
“As Elspeth Probyn notes: ‘...if you have to think about belonging, perhaps you are already outside’”(54).
Hua’s work rethinks the idea of citizenship as being solely grounded to the nation-state (Hua 52). To elaborate, citizenship—or the belonging to a nation—is re-imagined by Hua as being rooted in "culture" (rather than the nation) which allows her imagine new ways for dislocated cultural communities to belong (52).
She asks: how do gendered subjects and communities whose lives are governed by dislocation and displacement perform citizenship, and thus identities and homing desire, through various cultural practices to reclaim belonging in the place of settlement, to challenge social exclusion, and to imagine transnational diasporic communities?
What does citizenship mean?
Citizenship: the character of an individual viewed a member of society; behavior in terms of the duties, obligations, and functions of a citizen.
→ it is the status of a person recognized under the custom or law as being a legal member of a sovereign state or belonging to a nation—it has become synonymous with nationality.
T. H. Marshall: three elements to citizenship--civil, political and social rights.
Marilyn Friedman: “It can be an identity; a set of rights, privileges, and duties; an elevated and exclusionary political status; a relationship between individuals and their states; a set of practices that can unify – or divide – the members of a political community; and an ideal of political agency” (Friedman, 2005, p. 3).
<- the lower ninth ward to date ->
Biopolitics: State mechanisms and systems of power, control, and discipline that extend over the material (bodily, corporeal) and political (self-determination, subjectivity, agency, community) lives of its population.
Necropolitics: The use of technologies of material, psychological, structural violence to produce a class of the ‘living dead.’
Both are productive, in that they are about fostering particular kinds of self-reliant, assimilible citizens through regimes of control, surveillance, and discipline
Hua explains how cultural citizenship is being used in various diaspora communities as ways to imagine multiple modes of belonging within and beyond the coherence of national boundaries.
Dissident citizenship: Hua refers to Sparks as they define “dissident citizenship” as “the practices of marginalized citizens who publicly contest prevailing arrangements of power by means of oppositional democratic practices that augment or replace institutionalized channels of democratic opposition when those channels are inadequate or unavailable” (Sparks, 1997, p. 75).
-> dissident citizens use “alternative public spaces” and practices including marches, protests, picket lines, sit-ins, speeches, strikes, and street theater. In other words, “dissident citizenship” involves the “creative oppositional practices of citizens who either by choice or (much more commonly) by forced exclusion from the institutionalized means of opposition, contest current arrangements of power from the margins of the polity” (53).
Nomadic Citizenship: in referring to Joseph she explains “nomadic citizenship” as tied transnationally to “informal networks of kinship, migrancy, and displacement” (Joseph, 1999, p. 2). “Nomadic citizenship” challenges the nation-state as the sole arbiter of identity and citizenship (53).
And that “nomadic citizenship enables the articulation of psychic and social boundaries of legitimation through which they exist as cultural citizens within the state that disavows them in subtle and overt ways” (Joseph, 1999, p. 17).
• The idea of diaspora as an alternative framework of identification for racialized Europeans
• The construction of queer diasporic memory within the black European movement.
• This type of discourse, that stays tied to the idea of nation, continues to reproduce modes of exclusion—resulting in Black “others” creating their own black “other”— becoming a replication of a racial hierarchy
• An analysis of black Europe from this perspective could aid in shifting African diaspora discourse’s focus on the West within the black Atlantic framework by reassessing the relationship of space and time as it speaks to conversations of diaspora and homeland (79).
A continued exploration of the limits of blackness adds to diaspora’s potential for creating subjects can work with discourses of “dis-identification”. This potential, El-Tayeb argues, is most persistent through the reworkings of this thought in popular music, Third World Feminism, queer of colour theories, and the fusion of poetry and theory (60).
→El-Tayeb’s discusses the how black feminists use of poetry that refuses to produce internal Others. It becomes dialogic instead of dialectic.
→→→From this reoccurring conversation around the limitations of language, it is becoming apparent that forms of emancipatory praxis are being deployed less and less through language and more through creative and/or physical acts of resistance.
Poetry, according to Lorde, is precisely an important tool for feminist expression *because* of it being disvalued within the Western intellectual tradition. It possess all those qualities (emotion/intuition/oral/non-linerarity) that have also been attributed to women and people of colour.
This type of methodology calls for the blurring of boundaries rather than reinforcing/creating new boundaries.
-El-Tayeb focuses of Black Europeans for precisely this reason: their inherent position that muddies/blurs the boundaries of identity.
-It has helped in gender studies move beyond politics of identification and counter identification and instead, arrive at a politics of *disidentification*.
Ultimately what is revealed is that a continued exploration of the limits of blackness adds to diaspora’s potential for creating subjects can work with discourses of “disidentification”. This potential, El-Tayeb argues, is most persistant through the reworkings of this thought in popular music, Third World Feminism, queer of colour theories, and the fusion of poetry and theory (60).
Watching the rap at the beginning of this video, what kinds of things from both Hua and El-Tayeb’s work are being applied here?
https://www.theguardian.com/world/2016/apr/16/canada-first-nations-suicide-crisis-attawapiskat-history